Artificial intelligence is fueling billions of dollars in losses to scams as criminals clone people’s voices to compromise credit cards and bank accounts.
The classic scam where victims receive a call from a loved one asking for money is far easier with AI, WBTV reports.
Cybersecurity expert Thomas Hyslip, who spent two decades in federal law enforcement with the Secret Service and the Department of Defense, says it takes a matter of seconds to create impostor audio.
“Historically they had to manually go out and steal credit cards… Now with AI they can take what they already have and use that to enhance their ability to commit fraud…
Some of them, you can do [in] as many as 30 seconds. You can clone somebody’s voice and then make phone calls or, you know, use it to try to trick voice recognition. Some of the banks now use voice recognition in place of the phone number.”
Big Four accounting firm Deloitte says its base case forecast finds fraud from generative AI will reach $30 billion by 2027, rising from $12.3 billion in 2023.
In a statement to WBTV, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) urged people to be cautious in allowing personal information to be made public, noting that hackers are now able to take seemingly trivial snippets of video or photos and use them to conduct fraud.
“AI-enabled synthetic audio content is becoming increasingly difficult to detect and easier to make, which will likely allow criminals to potentially conduct successful fraud schemes against families, individuals, businesses, and financial institutions.
The FBI urges the public to exercise caution when posting or direct messaging personal photos, videos, and identifying information on social media, dating apps, and other online sites. Although seemingly innocuous when posted or shared, the images and videos can provide malicious actors an abundant supply of content to find and target victims and exploit for criminal activity.”
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